Could I Help?

I would like to help thrive. I'm not sure how much help I can be because I'm not an artist or a coder BUT I do know a lot about evolution and biology. I also have some idea of how technology developed in history. I see there are plenty of coders, hopefully enough to get the job done, but I don't see lots of people who's job is to prevent this from becoming fan made spore II... If you don't need anyone with this particular knowledge but no coding or art experience then that's fine. I don't want to be accepted if I'm not going to be of any use.

I also have a question: will religion be of any significance? I know that throughout history, religion has been one of the most powerful influences. I really hate how religion was done in spore. In space stage religious groups all believe in the same systems. This completely destroys the point of religion in history. People fought (and still do) each other for their religious beliefs againsed other religions. Also almost all cultures had a religion of their own. Now, people are doubting their religion because of science, but that's not something I want to discuss. In spore, most races don't seem to have a religion unless the player "pretends" they do. Religion is one of the most important things to get right (in my opinion) for civilized stages.

Not to be harsh or anything, but you've got it backwards. We have nowhere near enough coders, and generally quite (more than) enough ideas people. The reason it may seem to be the other way is because we heavily encourage programmers to apply, since we need them so badly (and few new programmers end up contributing regularly after making an application and talking to us for a week or so; so our retention rate is pretty bad too); while we actively discourage pure ideas people from applying. Thus, we have lots of applications from coders, but nothing that's seen much activity from ideas-people. If you want to discuss ideas, I heavily encourage you to take them to our subreddit, since reddit is so much better-built for these sorts of discussions, and there's less of a barrier-to-entry for people wanting to contribute to a discussion there.

More explanation:

Basically, we closed most of the forum off from ideas-discussion, since in the old days when it was open, it was too open and thus ended up being a big waste of time most of the time. So now we try to limit that; by limiting the biggest culprit of runaway bikeshedding; which generally boils down to ideas talk.

To be fair though, we still do a bunch of ideas-talk on the forum. And I just complained to the other devs about it, and suggested we be nice and take our own bikeshedding to reddit too, so anyone with an opinion can weigh in.

But anyway, for a biology-ideas person to be accepted immediately they'd probably need to have a relevant degree, have lots of cites and papers ready to substantiate their ideas, be able to make very well-formed arguments, and to be doing research into a very-relevant field. Or they'd need to have another, usually-more-relevant skill.

The main problem with accepting pure-ideas people is that from a simple application, we have no idea whether someone will know what they're talking about, and will generally be really useful in discussions. Much better to have them do their discussion on reddit, and when we see somone's just generally a really great addition to the team despite having nothing but ideas to give, really, then we'll take them.

Oh, and as for your question, you have a great point, and I have loads of ideas, but as you can guess, I'd prefer if the discussion was on reddit.